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Why I turned the ‘Red Dead Redemption II’ video game into a history class on America’s violent past

Preface for Not Even Past: What place do video games have in the history classroom? Until recently, most educators dismissed this medium as frivolous and sensational. But given the staggering time that students spend in these digital landscapes, and the increasing thoughtfulness and diversity of major games, it may be time for a reassessment. My own experience in teaching a college class on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American history through the Red Dead Redemption franchise has convinced me that there’s tremendous future potential in the intersection of games and serious history. My experimental course at the University of Tennessee has seen unprecedented enrollments each semester, and student enthusiasm during class has similarly shot upward. I’ve adapted the course into a book, Red Dead’s History, which has also convinced me that digital games can provide a bridge for professional historians to reach wider audiences and share the academy’s wealth of knowledge. The book has granted me opportunities for public engagement that I could never have imagined previously – many made possible by my audiobook’s narrator, actor Roger Clark, who played Red Dead Redemption II’s protagonist. Roger and I spoke to a packed auditorium at San Diego Comic-Con, and were interviewed by one of YouTube’s most popular game streamers. When Roger and his fellow actor Rob Wiethoff made a surprise visit to my college class, game news site IGN broadcast the footage to millions of viewers. While this short-form public engagement often lacks the depth that academic scholars are accustomed to, it leads viewers toward a book that is very much a scholarly product, as Red Dead’s History is a synthesis of recent historiography in U.S. Western, Southern, and Appalachian history. And as early reader reviews indicate, new audiences are finding that scholarship is fresh and illuminating. As video games continue their astronomical growth in future decades, historical games will remain central to the medium. How will professional historians leverage this public passion toward serious study of the past? The future is wide open.

This article was originally published in “The Conversation” on 7.19.2024.

Title of course:
Red Dead’s History: Exploring America’s Violent Past Through the Hit Video Game

Q: What prompted the idea for the course?

This course was born during the COVID-19 pandemic. Confronting the lockdowns of 2020 and uncertain months spent at home, I rekindled a high school hobby that I had neglected for two decades – video gaming.

Used copy of Red Dead Redemption II. *Source: Not Even Past*

One of the first games I picked was “Red Dead Redemption II,” set in a fictionalized America of 1899. The game follows the Van der Linde gang, a diverse crew of idealistic outlaws, as they flee authority in an increasingly ordered and hierarchical world. Since its 2018 release, the game has sold more than 64 million copies, making it the seventh on the list of all-time bestselling video games – and the only historically themed one on the list.

While video games had been a mindless pastime in high school, this time around, I was playing as a professor who specialized in U.S. history since the Civil War. And though that made me a far more critical gamer, I was also genuinely surprised at how often RDRII – as it is often called – alluded to major topics that historians have spent generations debating.

These topics include corporate capitalism, settler colonialism, women’s suffrage, and the inequalities of race in an era that Mark Twain had called the “Gilded Age” – a period where the dazzling wealth of a small handful sharply contrasted with the misery of common people. These weighty topics were often on the game’s sidelines rather than at center stage – but they were present nevertheless.

Q: What does the course explore?

Given the centrality of violence to the video game, the course seeks to understand what really spurred bloodshed in the United States between 1865 and 1920.

In RDRII, gunfire is usually sparked by personal grudges, robberies, or the overconsumption of alcohol. But in Gilded Age America, it wasn’t so simple. Instead, broader social problems were the primary catalyst of violence. First, Americans fought over the emerging regime of corporate capitalism. Should new businesses like U.S. Steel and the Union Pacific Railroad, who wielded never-before-seen power and influence, dominate workers and consumers alike? Many resisted such an idea through protests, strikes, and sometimes bloodshed.

The Pullman Strike of 1894. Railroad workers who protested poor working conditions and low wages committed arson and destroyed property, which was followed by brutal state and federal law enforcement crackdown efforts.
*Image source: Wikimedia Commons.*

Secondly, Americans came to blows over the unfulfilled promises of racial equality that were written into the U.S. Constitution after the Civil War. Especially in the South, where the vast majority of African Americans lived, the formerly enslaved and their descendants demanded inclusion in politics and a chance to progress economically. But many white Southerners resisted such efforts, often using terrorism to push their Black neighbors into subservient positions.

Q: Why is this course relevant now?

American society in the late 19th century was ruptured by inequalities wrought by capitalism and race – and so is ours today. In the wake of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, it’s wise that we look back at the long road that brought America to its contemporary dilemmas of racial violence and the gap between rich and poor. A handy way to open that conversation with young Americans is through video games – an industry that has now surged in value to eclipse both music and movies and which might be the key to reaching this generation’s students, as studies are beginning to show.

Q: What’s a critical lesson from the course?

One key lesson is about the city of New Orleans, fictionalized in RDRII as “Saint Denis.” In the game, the outlaw protagonists trade fire with the city’s blue-coated policemen following a botched bank robbery, leaving bodies in the streets. Few gamers could guess that a similarly bloody firefight with the police riveted the actual city in 1900, just a year after the game is set, leaving seven officers dead. Yet here the outlaw was a Black man, Robert Charles, who took a violent stand against police abuse and the emerging system of Jim Crow segregation.

In response to his attacks on the police, white mobs roamed the city and indiscriminately killed Black civilians. Therefore, the explosion of violence in New Orleans was produced not by simple banditry but by one of America’s towering social dilemmas.

Illustration in "The Mascot" newspaper, New Orleans, 1889. "Results of Police Outrage Investigations." — Illustration in “The Mascot” newspaper, New Orleans, 1889. “Results of Police Outrage Investigations.” The first panel of the cartoon entitled “As the Public See Him” shows a policeman with the head of a lion, waving a pistol and bloody billy-club over two prostrate bleeding bodies, as a citizen in the distance reacts in horror. The scond panel entitled “As the Committee Makes Him” shows policeman with the head of a lamb and angel wings, carrying a beribboned staff, exiting from a portal labled “Police Examining Committee” with a sign “Whitewashing Done Cheap”. A man with a top hat and cane looks on through binoculars.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Q: What materials does the course feature?

I frequently begin course sessions with a brief video cutscene or gameplay footage from RDRII before we dive into the actual history that the games represent – or sometimes, misrepresent. For reading, students dive into scholarly monographs such as historian K. Stephen Prince’s “The Ballad of Robert Charles,” on the violent dilemmas of race in New Orleans. They also read various original sources, such as cowboy memoirs, train schedules, and a Texas newspaper from 1899.

Q: What will the course prepare students to do?

Anyone who has taken my class – or read my new book – will know that the big social problems we are wrestling with today have deep roots and took their modern shape during the same 1865-1920 period that is memorably captured in RDRII. They’ll also become much more discerning consumers of digital media and games in particular; they’ll be better able to assess and critique representations of history on the digital screen.

Tore Olsson, Associate Professor of History, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of Indigenous Autocracy: Power, Race, and Resources in Porfirian Tlaxcala, Mexico, by Jaclyn Ann Sumner (2024)

An Indigenous person in a position of power during the Porfiriato, the period from 1876 to 1910 when General Porfirio Díaz ruled Mexico, seems almost unimaginable. But in Indigenous Autocracy: Power, Race, and Resources in Porfirian Tlaxcala, Jaclyn Sumner tells the captivating story of Próspero Cahuantzi, who governed Tlaxcala for nearly 26 years—longer than any other governor of the period. What makes Cahuantzi’s tenure unique is not only his Indigenous heritage, but the ways in which he skillfully leveraged power in a political climate steeped in racial prejudice and anti-Indigenous policies. While Porfirio Díaz’s regime was persecuting and oppressing Indigenous populations elsewhere, including pursuing brutal campaigns like the attempted extermination of the Yaqui, Cahuantzi defied the odds by wielding executive power in Tlaxcala.

Indigenous Autocracy is not a biography. However, Sumner skillfully uses Cahuantzi’s life and career to explore the complex political practices that supported Díaz’s authoritarian regime, addressing themes like race, ethnicity, liberalism, nation-building, authoritarianism, and environmental control in late 19th and early 20th-century Mexico. Through a regional focus on Tlaxcala, Sumner challenges the common portrayal of a monolithic and omnipotent Porfirian government. She illustrates how Díaz’s authority was far from uniform across Mexico and that his policies were more flexible and negotiable at the local level.

Portrait of Próspero Cahuantzi — *Próspero Cahuantzi. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Sumner probes the question of how Cahuantzi maintained his power over such an extended period of time, especially given that some of his policies seemed to conflict with Díaz’s modernization plans. Although his military career and loyalty to Díaz initially solidified his position, it was Cahuantzi’s ability to strategically invoke his Indigenous identity—both personally and on behalf of Tlaxcala—that secured his continued tenure. Cahuantzi came to embody the idealized “civilized Indigenous” figure that the Porfirian regime was willing to support: an individual connected to Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past and yet aligned with the government’s goals of progress, order, and stability. In this way, Sumner argues, Cahuantzi’s carefully crafted image of indigeneity was highly selective, reinforcing anti-Indigenous sentiments against those who did not conform to this model of the “civilized” Indigenous leader. This selective indigeneity was not only politically expedient but also profoundly rhetorical; it was tailored to fit the expectations of an assimilationist state rather than reflecting a deep commitment to Indigenous practices or worldviews.

While Sumner presents Cahuantzi as a compelling figure through which to examine Porfirian policies at the local level, there are moments when she may ascribe too much influence to him. A more detailed exploration of Tlaxcala’s local government structures would have strengthened the analysis by illustrating how other officials or advisors within Cahuantzi’s administration may have influenced governance. Additionally, since indigeneity is a core theme of the book, an expanded investigation into the worldview of Tlaxcala’s Indigenous groups—including the Nahuas and Otomíes—and their usos y costumbres (customs and traditions) would have enriched our understanding of how Cahuantzi’s identity intersected with local Indigenous cultures. Sumner suggests that Cahuantzi’s knowledge of local relationships, resources, and traditions allowed him to implement policies that maintained social stability and content. But a deeper analysis of his Indigenous heritage could have illuminated how it informed his political decisions. Such an absence suggests that Cahuantzi’s indigeneity functioned more as a symbolic or rhetorical construct to advance his career, rather than a driving force behind his governance.

*Cabinet meeting of Porfirio Díaz. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Sumner argues as well that Díaz tolerated Cahuantzi’s leadership in Tlaxcala partly because the state’s modest size and economy posed little threat to the Porfirian modernization project. However, she later notes that in 1910, “Tlaxcala’s contribution was among the most comprehensive, even as compared to larger states” (p. 130). This increase in revenue, attributed in part to Cahuantzi’s efforts, hints at latent economic potential within Tlaxcala that perhaps went underestimated by Díaz’s central administration. Sumner leaves us to consider why Díaz, despite the era’s prevailing Social Darwinist and positivist ideologies, allowed a high-profile Indigenous governor like Cahuantzi to remain in power. This question deepens our understanding of the regime’s racial and social policies, revealing complexities often overlooked.

Book cover for Indigenous Autocracy: Power, Race, and Resources in Porfirian Tlaxcala, Mexico

I cannot emphasize enough what a pleasure it was to read Jaclyn Sumner first monograph. This work is both meticulously researched and artfully written, offering a narrative that is both intellectually rich and eminently accessible. Its thoughtful organization and clear language make it immensely rewarding for scholars but also accessible to readers beyond the academic sphere. Overall, it succeeds in its aims and makes a substantial contribution to the historiography of Mexico, Tlaxcala, and the Porfiriato, as well as scholarship on indigeneity, race, and authoritarianism in Latin America. It sheds valuable light on the complexities of Indigenous identity and political power within Mexico’s modernization project.

Raquel Torua Padilla is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a B.A. in History from the Universidad de Sonora and is currently a CONTEX Fellow. Her research focuses on the history of Indigenous peoples in the Northwest of Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, with a particular emphasis on the Yaqui people. Her current projects examine Yaqui militias and their diaspora during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Review of Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950 (2022) by Jennie N. Shinozuka

Jeannie Shinozuka’s new book, Biotic Borders, is not only a “history of bugs and other bothers,” [209] but also a demonstration of how ecological actors played a fundamental role in shaping sociopolitical responses to Japanese immigration to the US from 1890-1950. The book shows how racialized invasive species furthered American nationalism in the name of biological security. The othering of invasive species along racial lines and legitimate alarm over environmental destruction contributed to the consolidation of American biotic borders. This review of Biotic Borders highlights how ecological fears were deeply intertwined with racial politics of the era.

Frequently, these invisible eco-invaders—mostly agrarian insect pests—were used by American citizens and government agencies as an excuse to take action against an equally invisible ‘yellow peril’—the increasing number of Asian migrants—through discriminatory agriculture policies, scientific racism, accusations of treachery, medical discrimination, and the consolidation of borders. Indeed, Shinozuka argues that the erection of “‘artificial barriers,’ such as plant quarantines and other regulations ‘redrew’ imaginary lines determined by national boundaries.” [55] In this way, the transpacific ecological borderland enshrined at the end of a romanticized Western American frontier contributed to nationalist notions of a biologically native American utopia, and ultimately, an emergent American empire.

Drawings of frogs, snails, and insects from Japan, early nineteenth century.
Source: Library of Congress.

Throughout the book, Shinozuka uses ‘immigrant’ in reference to human migrants and the non-human plants and animals that crossed the Pacific during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The human immigrants were the large numbers of Japanese and Japanese-Americans who struggled against pervasive anti-Asian hostility in the United States. The non-human immigrants consisted of the hundreds of Asiatic plant species, and the insects that lived within their fibers, that were shipped and sold in the US to meet a growing demand for Japanese-style gardens and “Asian exotics.” [9] As these two types of ‘immigrant’ became entangled in the American imagination, so too did American hostility towards all foreign species, human or not. However, the word ‘immigrant’ is not the only parallel Shinozuka draws between these two subjects of her book. Biotic Borders is a compelling attempt to connect these two histories, which Shinozuka argues are inextricably bound together.

As agriculture in the US became professionalized and monoculture became standardized, the fear of invasive species, imported via increasingly globalized transportation networks, exploded. Entomologists empowered by newly-established government agencies like the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Plant Industry sought to uncover the origin of invasive insects. Yet by searching for their non-native origins, these scientists racialized the insects, giving them names such as the Japanese Beetle or the Oriental Scale and facilitating two-way comparisons between humans and insects: the personification of insects and the dehumanization of humans. In turn, these racialized species provoked widespread biological xenophobia, spurred on by the real fear of economic destruction in the agrarian sector, and by a growing desire for environmental border control to protect an illusory vision of American biological nativism. The fear of racialized insects shaped hostility towards similarly racialized human immigrants.

Dr. Wm. A. Taylor, Chief Bureau of Plant Industry, Dept. Agrl, circa 1920.
Source: Library of Congress.

Each of the eight chapters of Biotic Borders is loosely centered around a particular cross-border ecological crisis or invasive species. Chapter 1 focuses on the San José Scale (Quadraspidiotus perniciosus), Chapter 2 on the Chestnut Blight (Cryphonectria parasitica), Chapter 3 on insects at the US-Mexico border, and so on. However, the predominant thread of the book is dedicated to the experience of Japanese immigrants during the growing, racist, anti-immigrant hysteria prevalent at the time. In Chapter 4, Shinozuka explains how Japanese Americans were classified as “unhygienic,” [103] were accused of price fixing and unfair business practices, and were accused of bearing responsibility for hookworm and foodborne illnesses.

Chapter 5 shifts focus to Hawai’i. As a gateway between the US and Asia, Hawai’i became a central focus in securing ecological borders. Shinozuka uses the chapter to demonstrate how scientific authority was deployed as a tool of empire. The remaining chapters cover a growing anti-Japanese paranoia during WWII, including a discussion that joins the incarceration of the Japanese American population and the widespread use of chemical pesticides to combat Japanese Beetle infestations.

Biotic Borders is a thoroughly researched book. Shinozuka uses a variety of sources, including oral histories, to weave together human and non-human narratives. However, occasionally the exact relationship between the human and insect migration is obscured. Whether nativism was a driving force in the creation of ecological borders or whether the creation of ecological borders contributed to growing nativism is unclear in her telling. Similarly, the causal relationship between alarm over Japanese immigration and alarm over plant and insect immigration is sometimes confused. This said, what is clear from Shinozuka’s book is that these processes mirrored each other, and that through one, we gain a better understanding of the other.

By the end of the book, Shinozuka weaves the historical questions of globalization and racism with contemporary challenges. Citing the recent example of COVID-19, she demonstrates how politicians fixated on the Chinese origins of the virus, compared the pandemic to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and—just like at the end of the nineteenth century—racialized a biotic invader. The book concludes with a direct disagreement with environmental historian Peter Coates who once argued that the brand of “botanical xenophobia” and “eco-racism” [217] presented by Shinozuka had largely dissolved by the late twentieth century. To Shinozuka, as globalization accelerated, science played an increasing role in “the transnational flow of bodies, agricultural products and livestock, and pollution” [219]. She argues that this role is too often obscured when immigration is discussed in a vacuum. Despite its somber content, the book ends with a hopeful note that Biotic Borders could serve as an example for an interdisciplinary, open-ended dialogue about questions of science, racism, nationalism, and ethics.

William Dinneen is a pre-doc research associate at the University of Pennsylvania’s PDRI-DevLab. He graduated with a bachelor’s in history from Emory University where he wrote a thesis about the environmental restoration of the Rocky Flats nuclear facility.

Review of Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (2014)

From the editors: One of the joys of working on Not Even Past is our huge library of amazing content. Below we’ve updated and republished Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s brilliant and moving review of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s magisterial Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States.

I first came across Felipe Fernández-Armesto many more years ago than I care to admit: I met his words first, before I met him. I was dazzled by Felipe’s Columbus: the flow, the style of his writing, the power of his argument. And then I came across Millennium. I had just finished graduate school and I was earning my bread and butter teaching large survey classes of Latin American History, and even larger ones of World History. I was to offer kids sweeping panoramas: from the age of the dinosaurs to current events, namely, the Cold War. Global history was yet to produce a multimillion dollar textbook industry. So Millennium came to me as a breadth of fresh air: irreverent, fast paced, learned, entertaining, full of strange and fascinating vignettes, from Ming China to Peronist Argentina. I was then writing my How to Write the History of the New World. I had a fellowship to the John Carter Brown Library.

One of the first things I learned at the JCB was that Felipe occupied the office right next to ours. We had 8 cubicles. His was for him, alone. He kept sherry in his office. His accent and demeanor made him seem unapproachable. I don’t remember the official title he was given, some kind of JCB lordship: The Lord of the Rings, I think. During the fellows’ luncheons he would tear into the other fellows’ arguments with probing, disarming questions, prefaced always by a learned and most insightful comment on any and every field of expertise. When asked about his own research, he would reply “civilizations.” It turns out, that year, he was writing that book. The whole thing was frightening to me at the time.

The John Carter Brown Library's MacMillian Reading Room: a large, richly decorated hall with a high ceiling. Low bookshelves and large pieces of art line the walls.; desks with work stations stand in the middle of the room. A few researchers are visible at the desks. — *The John Carter Brown Library’s MacMillan Reading Room, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

And then one day, I noticed Felipe spoke Spanish. I approached him for the first time in Spanish and a friendship emerged. He came for dinner and met my kids, Sebastian and Andrea, both then toddlers. Later Felipe would read my manuscript and help me improve it before it became a book; he wrote a blurb when it was published; promoted it in England and beyond; got it noticed in The Economist; passed judgment on my tenure; followed me around with letters of support in my peripatetic existence. Felipe and his awesome power changed my career and buoyed up my self-esteem. I owe him big.

Felipe and I share something beyond friendship and a common language: our view of the past. The book before us, Our America, epitomizes that shared view. It is about turning perspectives upside down. It is about reading self-satisfying narratives of the past irreverently, mockingly, unsparingly. It is about elucidating the political work that History, with capital H, does. History creates myths that move and inspire, but it also creates myths that silence. Our America is a book about myths: the fountain of youth, the cities of Cibola, the pursuit of King Arthur, the realm of Queen Calafia, the curse of Zorro, the revenge of Moroni, the republic of Hesperus. Our America narrates the history of the United States from a perspective I have often tried to use myself: from the South, rather than the East.

The book is divided into three periods: 1) when Hispanics loomed large over the colonial territories that are now the United States; 2) when Hispanics lost power in the 19th century as the Anglo-imperial frontier expanded into the West, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and the Pacific, and when Hispanics came to be seen as racially inferior, misbehaving children to spank and educate; and 3) when Hispanics in the 20th century slowly crawled their way back from marginalization to claim forcefully a central role in the polity, demographically, politically, and culturally.

The first period uses the myths of the fountain of youth, the cities of Cibola, the knights of King Arthur, and the realm of Queen Calafia to demonstrate how the Hispanic dimensions of US colonial history shaped its every detail, from Roanoke to Jamestown, to Plymouth, to Massachusetts Bay, to Charleston, to the Ohio River Valley, to the siege of Yorktown. From the Puritan plantations to the American Revolution. Hispanics shaped every colonial event described in college textbooks.

The second period makes for tearful, tragic reading: losses, lynching, brutality, and racial slurs aimed at Hispanics, Indians, and Blacks, all lumped together. Felipe follows El Zorro and the Mormon prophet Moroni to describe the losses of California, Texas, the Rockies, the Marianas, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, where Hispanics, Blacks, Comanche, Sioux, Apache, and Pacific Islanders had created shared worlds together for generations. Those shared worlds were found in the prairies, on the Mississippi (from the Ohio all the way to Louisiana), and on the Pacific coast (from Monterrey and Baja to Manila). These worlds surrendered to industrialization, machine guns, railroads, steamboats, industrial tractors, and millions of land hungry illegal immigrants from England, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Norway, and Central Europe, who came to the land to act as, say, Texas Rangers and carry out genocide.

The third period is not less tragic; it narrates the age of braceros and forced deportation, from the Great Depression to the Great Recession. Felipe reminds us that liberal Obama, who won his first and second presidency on the back of the Hispanic vote, has deported 1.4 million undocumented immigrants, four times as many as George W Bush, who only managed to deport 400,000. But this age of violence and racism, and merciless labor exploitation, has also experienced the Return of Aztlan: a huge demographic explosion, the Chicano movement, Cesar Chavez, and Civil Rights. And it also seems to be on its way to turning the Anglo republic into a republic of Hesperus, the king of the Hesperides, whose islands the chronicler Fernandez Oviedo claimed where in fact Hispanic colonies.

Seven men in work clothes pose for a photograph in a beet field near Stockton, California in this black-and-white photograph. — *Marjory Collins, photographer.* Stockton (vicinity), California. Mexican agricultural laborer topping sugar beets. 1943. Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

There is little with which to take issue in this book. I share Felipe’s perspective and passion. I wish I could claim I also share his panache, wit, and style. The book is filled with insight, one-liners, and striking reversals of traditional narratives. Let me share with you a few:

Describing how millions of acres were stolen from rancheros in Texas, Nuevo Mexico and California in the 19th century to create large Anglo latifundias, Felipe points out: “The notion that US rule always broke latifundias and introduced morally superior smallholders is risible.”
His account of guerrilla fighters and rebels like Joaquin Murrieta who acted as social bandits in Texas and California explores also the emergence of the literary character of El Zorro as the first superhero to emerge in the US. Felipe then adds: “It is to me a delicious irony that a great line of American superheroes, with their lone trajectories, their alienating experiences, the disguises that place them outside society, and the astonishing dexterity with which they stun evildoers, goes back to a prototype who was a legend of anti-US resistance.”
His description of what the arrival of Anglo capital and law into New Mexico meant, is guided by the reading of the autobiography of Agnes Morely Cleaveland. After a description of her romantic narrative of frontier violence and odd Anglo characters, Felipe bitingly concludes: “Agnes Cleaveland was the chronicler of the Americanization of New Mexico, and her evidence, because it is neutral, is decisive in demonstrating that the United States was not a “civilizing influence.” On the contrary it brought more lowlifes, scapegraces, and refugees from civilization to the colony than ever before.”

I could multiply the examples, but you get the point.

I would not do my job if I were not to deliver some critical comments on Felipe’s book. So to conclude, let me offer a few.

I enjoyed the first section more than I did the second and the second more than I did the third. The third section on the revitalization of Aztlan and the return of Hispanics into the mainstream of America follows the Chicano narrative too closely to offer fresh insights. How to present Hispanics as something more than undocumented or exploited laborers? How to populate the more recent history of the Hispanic diaspora with Nobel Prize winners, scientists, philosophers, economists, opera singers, and captains of industry to offset the dominant image of popular culture, one of curvaceous Shakira and awesome yet corrupt baseball players? And there is the history of the reverse: the “USification” of Latin America, namely, the transformation of a region by capital, values, and returnees from the United States. In the South there lies the Anglo just as deeply within as lies the Hispanic within the North. We can no longer sever the Hispanic from the Anglo, neither here nor there.

The second section on tragic outcomes, therefore, could have been balanced by a more continental approach of mutual influences, cutting both ways. It could have yielded a narrative of Hispanic influence and continental creativity beyond the bandit and the pistolero. I have in mind the printing presses of Philadelphia that in the first half of the nineteenth century became an endless source of books and ideas, shaping Latin America’s public sphere, just as much as did the books printed in London or in Paris in Spanish in the nineteenth century. There is also the case of the origins of American international law and the law of nations that Greg Grandin has so insightfully described in a recent article in the American Historical Review. Grandin shows that jurisprudence and identities, both in the North and South, were the product of codependences and mutual influences. In short, the Hispanic 19th century in the US is much more than dispossession and violence (for other examples of what is possible, see also Gregory Downs’ provocative essay on the Mexicanization of 19th-century American Politics).

The first section is for me the most satisfying and the one about which I know most. It manages to do what was a call to arms for me in 2006, namely, to Iberianize the early modern Atlantic. There are a few Puritan Conquistadors walking through Felipe’s pages. I therefore felt confirmed, justified, in short, delighted. But even here more could be done. I have encountered, for example, English Calvinist debates on colonization, in the 1610s in 1629 that were thoroughly shaped by Iberian categories of dominium and sovereignty. The odd figure of Roger Williams with his radical ideas about religion and state can better be interpreted if we put him in dialogue with Las Casas. Williams knew well the ideas about the radical separation of spiritual and temporal sovereignty so forcefully presented by Bartolomé de Las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria to undermine any Spanish claims of rightful possession of property and authority in the Americas. Williams got to his ideas about state and religion by first offering a critique of Calvinist and Stuart notions of dominium and sovereignty in America. This facet of Williams completely escaped Edmund Morgan’s pioneering study published 50 years ago. In 2012 it continues to escape John Barry, whose Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul remains as parochial as Morgan’s. Both Barry and Morgan should have known better had they not be so provincially Anglo: to study Williams is to study Las Casas and Vitoria. To paraphrase Berry and to capture Felipe’s spirit, to study the creation of the American soul is in fact to study the creation of the Hispano-American soul.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Rising From the Ashes: The Oklahoma Eagle and its Long Road to Preservation

by Jaden Janak

On May 31, 1921, Greenwood, a district in Tulsa, Oklahoma crafted by Black business people and professionals, burned to the ground. After a young white girl accused Dick Rowland, a Black elevator attendant, of sexual assault, mobs of white vigilantes attacked this Black community and its citizens for what the white rioters perceived as an injustice against their women. Conservative estimates claim that by the melee’s conclusion some 1,000 homes were destroyed, dozens (if not hundreds) of lives were lost, and a remarkable number of businesses gone. One of the businesses razed in the chaos of the Tulsa Race Massacre was the Tulsa Star—the city’s first Black newspaper, established in Tulsa just seven years earlier. In 1936, E.L. Goodwin, a local Black businessman, bought the rights to the Tulsa Star, renaming it The Oklahoma Eagle.

The Tulsa Star, November 9, 1918 (via Newspaper.com)

Intertwined with the story of the The Oklahoma Eagle is my own story. My family moved to Oklahoma when I was an infant, so that my father could attend law school at the University of Tulsa. After graduating in 1999, my father’s first job was as a law clerk at Goodwin & Goodwin, Attorneys at Law. I grew up listening to the stories of Jim Goodwin, the son of E.L. Goodwin, and playing with his beloved Westie aptly named Justice. In the same building where E.L. Goodwin and his staff worked to publish, The Oklahoma Eagle, — at the time the only Black newspaper in the city of Tulsa — my father and Jim Goodwin toiled away at civil rights cases for indigent clients. These efforts to publish the paper were not without struggle. Four years before my father began working at Goodwin & Goodwin, it looked like the Goodwins were going to lose control of The Eagle.

A framed article discussing the Eagle’s financial struggles that hangs on the wall at The Oklahoma Eagle.(via author)

With determination and the support of local benefactors, The Oklahoma Eagle survived these financial struggles. In remembrance of the hard times and the faith that carried them through, the Goodwins constructed a hanging altar of sorts known as the “Wall of Faith,” which sits outside where my father’s office once was.

“The Wall of Faith” located at The Oklahoma Eagle offices (via author)

Many years later and after my father went into private practice, I returned to The Oklahoma Eagle in 2016, this time as a staff writer and legal intern with my father’s former partner, Jim Goodwin. Mr. Goodwin assigned me to cover local and national criminal justice matters because of my background in community organizing and newspaper writing with Saint Louis University’s student newspaper, The University News. That summer I wrote about topics ranging from the police murder of Ollie Brooks to the Orlando Massacre. However, these articles are not available online. As I discovered during my time at The Eagle, the paper lacked the infrastructure to enable digitization of the paper’s archive and current issues. To begin solving this problem, I worked with then-editor Ray Pearcey to create social media and a proper website for the paper. Still, I worried about the paper’s growing archive and how to preserve it. The Tulsa City-County Library had already microfilmed some of the older copies of The Eagle in the 1980s, but the vast majority of the paper’s near 100-year old archive remained either missing or in grave condition. After some quick research, I realized digitization is an expensive endeavor and certainly not one I could accomplish as a rising junior in college. So, I left The Eagle at the end of that summer and returned to school.

Fast forward another few years to the summer of 2019 and I am a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Goodwin approached me earlier this year and requested I return to The Eagle one last time to complete his dream of digitizing the paper. I had no previous experience with physical archives, much less with digitizing archives, but I have always enjoyed a challenge. When I arrived at The Eagle offices, I was not sure what to expect as I had never before seen the physical volumes of the paper’s archive. The room where the archives rest do not contain the conditions archives typically do such as climate-control, archival boxes, and an ordering system. Rather, the archive room has clear water damage and the papers lay unboxed with the thin protection of trash bags covering those that are not simply left open to the elements. Mr. Goodwin and his family have fought vigorously to keep the paper alive and in the meantime, some upkeep has fallen by the wayside. After seeing the condition of the archive, I knew we needed to act fast and protect this important resource of Black Oklahoma history.

From left to right: Ray Pearcey, former editor of The Eagle, pictured with Jim Goodwin and Chad Williams. (via author)

Immediately, I scoured the internet and consulted my colleagues about how to proceed. Eventually, I located an existing partnership between the University of North Texas and The Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS) to digitize old Oklahoma newspapers. I sent an email to the Director of the OHS’s Newspaper Digitization Program, Chad Williams, proposing we form a partnership. Williams responded enthusiastically and said the OHS had been waiting for The Oklahoma Eagle to approach them. I thought my work had been accomplished just two days into my summer-long stay at the Eagle. This was not the case. I had not anticipated the deeply emotional process necessary for Mr. Goodwin to let go of the paper, his father’s enduring legacy and ultimately, his own. For the remainder of the summer, we debated back and forth about everything, from the expense necessary to digitize the paper ourselves to the changing role of newspapers in society. Indeed, newspapers are a dying form—one more likely to lose than to make money. Mr. Goodwin wanted to find a mechanism for him to sell his archive, produce income to sustain the paper, all while maintaining control of it. Disabusing him of this as a way forward proved to be one of the most difficult tasks of my burgeoning career.

Ultimately, Mr. Goodwin agreed to the OHS’s offer to digitize The Oklahoma Eagle for free while allowing us to maintain copyright privileges. During the process of signing this agreement, we discovered that someone from the paper (this person’s identity is still unknown) had been sending a copy of The Eagle to the OHS for forty years. The OHS, unbeknownst to the paper, had been microfilming issues for all that time. This has made the digitization process much easier than expected. In August, Williams along with a team of researchers gathered the remaining physical volumes of the paper and have begun work to digitize them. They will be returning the physical copies in archival boxes, so that the copies might survive longer. According to the agreement, the digitized version of The Oklahoma Eagle’s archive will be made publicly available on The Gateway To Oklahoma History by 2021, the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. As Lead Archivist on the project, I am still working with both The Oklahoma Eagle and the Oklahoma Historical Society to ensure the seamless nature of this partnership.

Final agreement between the OHS and The Oklahoma Eagle (via author)

As the Greenwood community prepares for the centennial anniversary of the Race Massacre, the city of Tulsa is finally reckoning with its dark history of displacement and genocide. In 1997, the city of Tulsa first convened a commission to lead an excavation of suspected mass graves containing the bodies of those killed during the Massacre. For political reasons, that search never happened. Now, a second commission has formed and has been tasked with leading the search. This time, however, the Mayor and the Tulsa Police Department have labeled this work a homicide investigation. Working with a team of archaeologists, historians, local activists, and government officials, the Mass Graves Commission hopes to locate the bodies of those deliberately discarded and forgotten. The history of The Oklahoma Eagle and the history of the Race Massacre are part and parcel of one another. Hopefully, as the 100-year anniversary approaches, the work of the Commission and the work of the OHS can meaningfully pay homage to the lives and intellectual history lost to this tragedy. The Oklahoma Eagle stands as a testament to Greenwood’s rich legacy of endurance as the paper quite literally rose from its ashes.

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Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America by John M. Monteiro (2018)

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nobody questioned enslaving Amerindians. In Blacks of the Land (originally published in 1994 as Negros da Terra) Monteiro studies Amerindian slavery in the Capitania de São Vicente, now known as São Paulo, and thus sheds light on practices and debates that took place all over the continent. What happened in São Paulo happened in Panuco, Hispaniola, Darien, Tierra Firme, Chile, Massachusetts, Georgia; in short, everywhere.

Monteiro traces slavery back to a widespread Amerindian institution. In coastal Brazil, the Portuguese found a linguistically unified indigenous world, yet one deeply ethnically fragmented. Indigenous societies built sharp corporate identities through raiding and counter-raiding. The Tupi did not incorporate captured rivals into households but dispatched them in rituals of cannibal consumption. The Portuguese used these practices to justify colonization and to build a native labor force.

The Portuguese ransomed captives from the Tupi for axes, scissors, and glass beads. Those “rescued” through trade became slaves. The use of the word rescate (rescue and commercial transaction) for ransom implied that it was better to be a slave in a Christian household than a morsel of a demonic cannibal. Purchasing slaves through native intermediaries was not the only strategy to get cheap labor. Slavers would get licenses to wage war on communities when the latter reportedly engaged in “unnatural” practices.

“Portuguese” raids (that involved hundreds and often thousands of indigenous allies), in turn, would lead the natives to counter-raid the Portuguese who would, in turn, gain new legal justification to wage war. This complex dynamic of just war and rescate did nothing but expand the institution of indigenous slavery in the Americas manyfold. It also imbued ideologies of indigenous captivity with deep religious, theological overtones.

Everywhere the Europeans went in the Americas, slavery flourished. To the theologically mindful, however, it soon became clear that Amerindian captivity was not the preferred route to indigenous conversion but a naked attempt at exploiting indigenous labor in mines, ranches, ports, and households. As in many other places in the Americas, the religious in Brazil began to call into question indigenous slavery. By the mid-sixteenth century in Sao Paulo, the Jesuits became adamant opponents of the Paulistas (settlers of Portuguese and indigenous decent).

The Jesuits created “aldeas” (towns) where captives were catechized. Aldeas, however, also became rotational pools of wage laborers for Paulistas, not slaves. The debate between Paulistas and Jesuits was over whether Indian captives were pliable-for-hire-Christian laborers or commodities whose bodies could be transacted at will and whose status would be inheritable. No one questioned just war or rescate as the preferred way to get converts or slaves.

Monteiro shows that in 1570 the crown introduced legislation to regulate indigenous slavery. Settlers had to justify raids and obtain licenses. The new legislation left paperwork, as raiders had to produce formal declarations of just war to proceed. Occasionally raiders would appeal to the Inquisition to cover their raids into the interior as expeditions to go after alleged heretics. Raiders would also often present their expeditions as mining prospecting.

As parties had to justify the legality of their raids, classifications of natives came in handy. Legal hurdles encouraged the science of ethnology. Monteiro describes how settlers and Jesuits created ever more involved taxonomies, separating agriculturalists from nomadic savages, first on the coast (Tupis vs Tapuia) and later in the interior (Guairá vs. Goiá, Guaikurú, Carijó, Caeté, Tememinó, Kayapó). Slavers clearly preferred Tupi and Guairá whose agriculturalism prepared them to be slaves on wheat growing ranches. Getting Tupi-Guaranies, however, became increasingly difficult as the Jesuits armed the Guarani with guns in their Paraguayan missions.

After 1596, the crown sided with the Jesuits who became default legal wardens of all new captives ransomed through trade or rounded up via punishing raids. Settlers, however, continued to keep the ransomed and the raided as “pieces.” Settlers would use wills to distribute Indians as property but would be careful not to leave notarial records of sales since these records could induce legal challenges and freedom suits. Dowries and inventories, however, still registered Amerindians in household and ranches as transferable property.

The debate between Jesuits and settlers persisted over the entire seventeenth century. In 1639, Jesuits had the Pope reissued the bull of 1537, a brief originally issued to abolish Amerindian slavery in Mexico and the Caribbean. The Jesuits also sought to reduce the power of landed elites by taking them to court and by setting up their own mills to bankrupt their rivals. Finally, in 1649, Paulistas expelled the Jesuits from the province

Pedro Alvares Cabral, after his discovery of Brazil in 1500, with native Indians (via The Jesuits and Slavery in Brazil)

This dynamic crated several different types of indigenous populations in São Paulo. The first group were those members of Jesuits towns of wage earners (aldeas) who came as captives from faraway places and often spoke many different unintelligible languages. After the 1649 Jesuit expulsion, the towns never recovered; they remained small and depopulated even after the Jesuits were allowed to come back to the province thirteen years later.

The second group were the indigenous slaves, working on settler’s ranches and in their households. Monteiro reconstructs the system of slavery in some detail. Slaves grew their own food (corn, manioc) and worked growing wheat. Wheat left the province on the back of Indians slaves too. Porters took the cargo to the port of Santos to be shipped to the sugar plantations of the northeast and Rio. Using slaves, not mules, allowed settlers not to have to invest in road infrastructure between the Paulista interior and the port.

Despite the stifling violence that characterized this society, indigenous slaves enjoyed some agency and some mobility. Slaves ran away. They also used church tribunals to initiate freedom suits. They also sought self-manumission and recreated fictive communities through the use of godparents and cofradias (brotherhooods). By the late seventeenth century, slave agency via runaway slave communities , freedom suits, self-manumission, and creolization, along with the arrival of African slaves, partially put an end to indigenous slavery in the province. Yet far more important to the demise of indigenous slavery was the growing difficulty in getting indigenous slaves from the interior.

The third group were those natives who remained sovereign and who therefore were either the target of raids or co-participants in Paulista raids. These groups disappeared from the coast as they removed themselves into the interior or were wiped out by disease and interethnic warfare (the War of the Tamoio,1550-1570, for example).

Monteiro reconstructs in detail the political economy of Paulista raids to get slaves and thus maintain Brazil’s ability to grow grain. As Tupis abandoned the coast, Paulistas went after the Guarani-Tupi located between Sao Paulo and the city of Asuncion in Paraguay. Monteiro describes how over the course of several decades, raiders organized large expeditions with Indian allies to net hundreds of Guarani slaves from the southwestern interior, particularly the Jesuits’ missions in Paraguay.

Under the false pretense of prospecting for mines of silver and gold to create a legal cover, the largest Paulista landowners led these expeditions themselves. Men like Raposo Tavares built reputations, fortunes, and noble lineages out of his raiding exploits. The era of large raiding expeditions, however, ended in the 1640s when the Guairá acquired guns and resisted large attacks in fortified Jesuit missions. Raids became death traps and a disaster for the businesses of leading Paulistas.

The raids, however, continued as the preferred enterprise of the poor. Raiders pressed deep into the interior of Matto Grosso and Maranhão. These raids lasted years and required involved logistics, including clearing the forest and setting up temporary settlements to grow food. These expeditions would later establish the fame of raiders as the men who first established the national territory of Brazil.

Monteiro brings the legendary raiders down to size. Paulistas built Brazil’s granary on the back of Amerindian slaves and devastating raiding expeditions that permanently changed the social ecology of the interior. Moreover, Paulistas did not create a frontier society of equals but a profoundly hierarchical one, split between ruthless lords and poor settler peasants, whose path to social mobility was the piecemeal collection of indigenous slaves in never ending, pointless raids into the interior. Monteiro also brings the Jesuits down to size. The Jesuits opposed slavery by creating towns of wage earners but their theology did nothing but confirm the authority of “just war” and “rescue” as the twin ideological pillars of slavery. The Jesuits battled slavery without addressing slavery’s underpinning justifications. Historians, however, should remain grateful to the Jesuits because their effort to regulate slavery created a large archive of petitions, declarations, and justifications upon which Monteiro’s masterful study rests.

Twenty-five years after its original publication, Negros da Terra stills stands, a testament to the strengths of Brazilian historiography. It is still path breaking when compared with the growing Anglo American scholarship on Amerindian slavery.

Also by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra:

From There to Here: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
Puritan Conquistadors
Jerónimo Antonio Gil and the Idea of the Spanish Enlightenment
When Montezuma Met Cortes

The Racial Geography Tour at UT Austin

By Edmund T. Gordon

For almost two decades, Ted Gordon has been leading tours of UT Austin that show how racism, patriarchy, and politics are baked into the landscape and architecture of the campus. This month, that tour goes live online. In honor of the launch of the new website, “The Racial Geography Tour,” we are featuring an interview Joan Neuberger conducted with Prof. Gordon last week.

JN: Let’s start with the origins of the tour: when and what made you want to start?

TG: Well that’s a good question, and there’s no real answer to it. I don’t know how long I’ve been doing it, and I’m not quite sure when it started, and the impetus for doing it is also foggy. It probably started somewhere around 2000, which means that I’ve been doing it for about almost 20 years now I guess, getting close to that, and I think it grew out of requests that were made to me as a young faculty member here to talk about the racial history of The University of Texas. I remember being invited to talk to the housing staff about racial history, and I think one of the things I wanted to do was talk about the history of the university being integrated in relation to its racial past, and being that it was a housing group I think I began to integrate some of the ideas about building and architecture into that discussion, so it actually started out as a slide show, and then at some point there was someone from out of town who was visiting. I was talking a little about the racial history and I was talking about, well actually we have Confederate statues on campus, and there’s a Confederate flag that flies and I said well hold on a second let me show you, nice day, we went out and started walking around and I think that’s the origin of it, some time ago

And you’ve been doing it on and off for a while. What kinds of responses have you had? Do people come up to while you’re talking and engage with you?

Sometimes they do, absolutely have people who join the tour as I’m doing it, and ask if they can follow along and certainly I have a lot of eavesdroppers and folks like that. Almost all the responses I get from both onlookers and people who are on the tour has been positive, well I know this to be the fact, that not that much readily available history of the campus and also not many tours of the campus itself that are available to folks outside the ones that are given to prospective students and all that, so I think there’s a fair amount of curiosity among students and others about the environment that they’re walking through on a day to day basis, so people seem to enjoy hearing about that and they want to know more about it.

There’s a lot in the ordinary (prospective) tours that the tours don’t go into — history of the tower, the kind of history that you’re talking about. What made you want to put it online?

The Littlefield Mansion

There’s a couple of things that made me want to put it online. Well, it wasn’t my idea first of all. The idea came from a young person who was working with us up in African and African Diaspora Studies, she was the electronic specialist or something like that and at any rate she was also the person who was helping me with my calendar, and helping to schedule the tours that I was doing, and she saw that the demand for the tour was becoming larger and larger and it was taking up more and more of my time, and then she also has this kind of digital and media background and thought it might be a good idea, and I think she was actually the one who got in touch with LAITS here and they jumped on it for whatever reasons, and that’s how it got going, so it wasn’t even really my idea. For me, really, it will help because I spend a lot of time giving tours. I gave 25 last semester, and it’s a large amount of time. I’ve got a lot of other things going on, and also people thought that it would be good to have it be available to a larger audience, and so that’s what’s behind it.

So the tour begins at the Littlefield mansion. Why did you start there?

Well, part of it is fortuitous. In recent years, my office was across the street from the Littlefield mansion, and so rather than having me hike some place else to begin, it seemed like a reasonable place to begin, but also it is the Littlefield Mansion. Littlefield personally had a lot to do with the origins of the University, but even more than that, the Littlefields positionality in Texas society is for me kind of indicative or emblematic of the folks who played the key role in the early years of the university, deciding that we need one and also serving the top positions in university, Littlefield’s biography in many ways really brings together a lot of forces that created the early university as it was. Plus there’s a building there that’s named after him, and it’s right across the street from the 40 Acres, so there’s just a number of reasons why it’s a reasonable place to start.

George Washington Littlefield

Let’s talk about his biography a little bit, because as you say it really brings together a lot of the different things that allowed white European people to come to Texas and make a lot of money, and be able to then found a university. So first of all he comes from a slave owning family–

Yes he does, from Mississippi–

A cotton producing family–

Absolutely–

And why did he stop farming cotton?

Well the big issue for Littlefield and all the rest of these folks was the Civil War, and so he went off the fight the Civil War in 1861, was injured, he had his man servant/ slave there with him who rescued him on the battlefield after he’s injured, and brought him back to Gonzalez, Texas where he recuperated, but that was the biggest issue. So after the end of the Civil War, there’s a problem with labor. In other words, where do you get enough labor now that the enslaved folks are free to be able to carry out, but there’s also problems with disease and various other kinds of things, financial disruption after the end of the Civil War, in the time of reconstruction, so he finds it difficult to be able to rebuild his cotton growing operation and then stumbles on to cattle, longhorn cattle.

And so he started raising cattle?

He had always been raising cattle as a side-line on his plantation, or in the area that he owned, but he discovered that by raising his own cattle and then buying cattle from neighboring farms and plantations and then driving them north to Kansas that he could make some money. I think his first drive was in the 1870s and he made a fair amount of money, and then from then on he didn’t actually drive the cattle himself, but he went into that business and became a cattle baron, owning property throughout central Texas, and up in the Panhandle, and in New Mexico, and west Texas, ended up controlling a huge amount of range land.

And where did all that land come from?

Well the land comes from, one of the things I talk about on the tour, is Littlefield was an ex-Confederate, and so in the period of time immediately after the Civil War, he was very much against what he would consider the invasion, the occupation of Texas by federal troops, but its those same federal troops and cavalry who were able to clear west Texas and New Mexico and particularly the Panhandle of the Comanche and other Native Americans who were there, which opened up that territory for people like Littlefield who would be able to exploit them, and then simultaneously, the massacre of the buffalo, over 20 million buffalo, created what Littlefield would see as virgin grass for his longhorns to feed on, and so it’s that kind of combined operation, plus the advent of the railroads pushing west from Kansas City, St Louis into Kansas that enabled them to make millions of dollars.

There are rumors that there are slave quarters in the basement of the Littlefield house.

There are rumors, but of course the Littlefield house was build in the early 1890s, or he occupied it in the 1890s. That’s 30 years more or less after the end of the Civil War, so of course there were no enslaved people who lived in the house, however, ex-enslaved people did and we know that Nathanial Stokes who was his man servant, ex-slave, till the day he died. He lived in the carriage house, above the carriage house and stables in the back of the Littlefield house there, and so I think the quarters that exist in the basement of the Littlefield mansion were probably quarters for domestic servants and many of them were undoubtedly ex-enslaved people, and maybe even his own.

So we’ve really just scratched the surface of Littlefield’s history, and let me just say at this point that there are additional resources on the website that go into more detail on everything that were going to be talking about.

You move from the Littlefield house to what used to be call the Women’s Campus, and this also is a fascinating piece of history that I didn’t know anything about, and I’ve been here for a long time, so can you describe the women’s campus and its architectural layout, and what was significant about that?

Alice Littlefield

The original housing for women on campus was over by where the Flawn Academic Center is now, but in the 1820s, Littlefield in his will left money and a piece of property to build the Littlefield dorm, named after his wife, as a dorm for freshman women, and then in 30s the University decided to create other living spaces for women in that vicinity, Andrews and Carothers were I think both opened in 1935, and so they created a women’s side of the campus. The main building there that kind of defines the whole space is Gearing Hall, the Home Economics building and if there’s any question about who that’s for, there’s a sculpture of a women and child on the façade there. They also put in Anna Hiss Gym, which is a gym for women, as well as playing fields for women behind the gym, and tennis courts just to the south of the gym for women. So it’s an area of campus for women built behind, on the north side, of the Tower, and in the tour I talk about the symbology of having women outside of the public sphere, outside of, or on the opposite side of, the entrance to the University, and what that means in terms of the gendered ideologies of the time.

You talk about how Gearing Hall was designed by the same architect, Paul Cret, who designed the Tower –the Tower’s our big administrative center, it’s the first building on campus, it is where the President’s office is housed now, the central library used to be there, it’s a big important tall building — and the same person who designed that designed Gearing Hall as a flat sort of circular building and the gendered nature of those two structures seems really clear, but you go further than that, and talk about the way they’re placed and the way the Tower even looks. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Gearing Hall

Sure. The point I’m trying to make on that whole section of the tour is to talk about how it is that space is gendered and space in terms of location of things, but also the design, the architecture, the naming, etc. And if you look at both the way in which the original women’s dorms, if you think about Littlefield, Carothers, and Andrews — Blanton wasn’t built until 1955, so the honors quad is only formed in the 1950s after they put Blanton there. So it’s a U shape, an open U shape that faces to the gym, and then you have Gearing Hall which is placed right on the axis, the north-south axis behind the Tower, to the north of the Tower, where’s there’s no mall leading up to it, and it opens up, it’s a also U shaped as well, and has a gateway, which opens up to the south with the Tower looming up above it. So it’s clear to me that there’s a kind of receptacle aspect to the architecture of Gearing Hall and a phallic kind of aspect to the Tower as a seat of power and kind of the public symbol of the University, and very masculine in that kind of way, and so there’s a femininity and a masculinity about the way the architecture is designed and Cret [Paul Cret], was the main consulting architect for all those buildings, and either implicitly or explicitly the gendered aspect of it is very clear.

And then you walk around to the west side of the Tower, which also has a really interesting history. The west mall is filled with these large planters and limestone walls, why was that?

The west campus, pretty shortly after the university was opened in 1883 became an area of residence for, originally faculty members and students, now it’s mostly students. And if you look carefully at the west mall, and you look at the planters and you look at the trees there, you’ll see that trees are much younger than the trees on the south mall and so they’re about 40, 50, 60 years old. So if you think we’re in 2019, you go back 50 years and now you’re talking about the 1960s, the late 1960s — so on the west mall which leads to Guadalupe and west campus where students are on the other side, think about what students were engaged in, in the late 1960s. There was a lot of political activity, civil rights, anti-war, free speech, and all those things were in fine form here at the University of Texas, students used that west mall area as an area of congregation. There was a relatively conservative President of the Board of Regents, Frank Erwin, we’ve got the Erwin Center named after him, who was particularly incensed by the students’ intransience or their rowdiness in terms of their politics, and one of his ways of dealing with it was to order that the University convert the mall into what we have today, putting walls up and down Guadalupe, and putting planters in the middle of the mall, and planting trees and in other ways making it difficult for students, large groups of students, to access, to really control the access to the campus, and to discourage the assembly of students in that particular area. So it’s a politicized landscape, very pretty, but political .

Lets talk about the statues on campus. Statues, everyone knows have been in the news, have been controversial politically. We have some new ones of civil rights heroes Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Barbara Jordan, and other statues are only marked by their former pedestals, so what’s that about? Could you talk about the statues?

I learned a new word with this, the removal of the statues, they’re actually plinths, who knew, and the plinths are still there and actually some of the statues are still there. I don’t know if you’ve been to see the Hogg statue, the return of James Hogg

I wanted to ask you about that…

Right, so the statues were placed actually ultimately in the early 1930s, but George Washington Littlefield began thinking about having statues be placed on campus probably in 1915 or 1916. 1915, if you think about, that’s 50 years after the end of the Civil War. There are some historians who claim that Littlefield was the wealthiest ex-Confederate, and he was very active in the state of Texas and elsewhere in terms of trying to memorialize the Civil War and the folks who fought in it. And he was a very big proponent, as you were mentioning earlier, of the Lost Cause. In fact, he and John H. Reagan were some of the biggest proponents of that.

The Lost Cause is an ideology which tries to say that the Civil War was fought to preserve the Constitution and the individual state’s rights to preserve what they considered to be one of the key aspects of the Constitution, which is the right to private property. So they want to make the claim that what the Civil War was about was a noble cause to enshrine and further the Constitutional rights that were originally granted; that the cause of the Civil War was not slavery itself but this issue over Constitutional and states’ rights within the context of the Constitution.

The Littlefield Fountain

One of the things that’s interesting, in the inscription that existed on the wall just to the west of the Littlefield Fountain, is an inscription that talks about Littlefield’s giving the money to construct this and one of the things it says is that the Civil War was fought for state’s rights and doesn’t mention slavery at all, so slavery gets disappeared. Littlefield is a very big proponent of that and so is J. H. Reagan. In fact, they played a major role in placing the Memorial to the Confederate Dead, which is at the entrance to the State Capitol grounds, which has Jefferson Davis as the largest figure there. Littlefield also, as a proponent of the Lost Cause, unlike other proponents of the Lost Cause who really looked to Robert E. Lee as the key figure in the Confederacy because he’s a less political figure and one who’s less identified with slavery than Jefferson Davis. Littlefield and Reagan were very big Jefferson Davis folks. So Littlefield gave the major part of the money for the Jefferson Davis memorial that’s up in Kentucky and he decided that he wanted to have Jefferson Davis as well as Robert E Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, J. H. Reagan, and James Hogg statues built on campus as a memorial to the Lost Cause. And his original idea was to have a huge bronze arch that extended over the south entrance to the 40 Acres, with Jefferson Davis right in the center of it all.

That got changed because there was some backlash, actually even before Littlefield passed in 1920. Littlefield put this idea and the money for it into his will. But there were people on campus who didn’t want as much of an association with the Lost Cause as Littlefield and some others did so there was some back and forth about that. So that’s when it was decided to add the statue for Woodrow Wilson. And also when it became clear, particularly after Littlefield’s death, that there wasn’t enough money in the will to build the entire arch, that’s when they decided instead of the arch to build the Littlefield fountain, which was a memorial to WW1.

So the idea then becomes that there’s a Lost Cause aspect of it, which was what Littlefield’s original wish was, but there’s also a notion of national unification around WWI but also particularly around the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Because Woodrow Wilson, of course, was a Democrat, a Southern Democrat. He also was a white supremacist. He resegregated the army, resegregated the federal offices in Washington, DC, wrote histories that were relatively sympathetic to the antebellum south and critical of Reconstruction. So this was the kind of figure that Littlefield but also the leadership of the University could get around.

Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945) in 1910. (via Wikipedia)

That’s the history of how that got placed. Of course the final placement was the same person, Paul Cret, who was the architect (of the Tower and Gearing Hall), decided that instead of having those statues at the very entrance to the University, to put them along the walkaway thereby tying the tower to the statuary and to the Littlefield Fountain and making of it a, well I have a relatively lengthy analysis of the white nationalist aspects of that whole tableaux, which I lay out in the racial geography tour.

You also mentioned the MLK statue and those others. One of the things that is clear to me is that all these symbols speak to each other. And there almost certainly would not have been a Martin Luther King statue on campus if those Confederate statues hadn’t existed and without a Martin Luther King statue on campus, we wouldn’t have had Barbara Jordan and we also wouldn’t have Cesar Chavez. So they all are in one way of another, in conversation with one another in interesting ways.

And in conversation with the community, right?, because it was protest about Jefferson Davis that led to the erection of a statue of MLK.

Yes, there were students in particular who thought not only Jefferson Davis but the rest of the Confederate statues were problematic. The University back in 70s was not about to move them, or in the 80s or in the 90s or do anything else about them, so one of the alternatives was to produce alternative symbology and that’s where Martin Luther King comes up.

Now if you ask most people on campus if Confederate flags flew in prominent places at U.T. I think even people who really care about these things would be surprised to know that they did. So where were they and how did they fly under the radar for so long?

Well they fly under the radar because most people don’t recognize the national flag of the Confederacy. What they recognize is what has been publicized since the 1950s and 60s, which is the battle flag of the Confederacy, which is St. Andrew’s cross. That became the kind of symbol of the rebirth of Ku Klux Klan, the white citizens’ groups at the time of, as part of the anti-civil rights and anti-Brown vs. Board of Education movements in the 50s and 60s. So most people don’t know the Stars and Bars as the Confederate Flag. That flag flew at least at two places. One was over the stadium over the scoreboard, and it also flew at the Erwin Center as part of Six Flags. Six Flags over Texas. Six Flags over Texas became an important symbol of Texas basically around the time of the Texas centennial in 1936. The Six Flags over Texas of course are Spain, France, Mexico, the Lone Star flag, the Confederate flag, and the United States flag. These are all the countries that Texas was under, one way or another. One of the things that the state of Texas was trying to do in the 1930s was to distance itself somewhat from the Lost Cause ideology, and to project itself as an American state, and as a pioneer state associated with American pioneering move west etc., and as a western state. And so in the sense that the United States was engaged in a struggle for freedom from previous colonial eras, Texas was positioning itself in that same kind of, using that same kind of notion of move towards progress, progress towards freedom, and independence, and so it emphasized its various associations on the way towards this America destiny of westward movement, and increased freedom, and progress, and all that. So within that context, the Six Flags over Texas became one of the key symbols of Texas and the Confederate flag was right there in the middle of it.

There is still Confederate symbology here on this campus. If you go up to the Tower, which was erected at precisely that time, if you look on the outside of tower it says 1836-1936. The Tower was open in 1937, but it was still part of this Texas centennial celebration mode, and if you go up to the second floor and you go into what the main room used to be the university main library and now is the Life Sciences library, and if you look up you’ll see these big plaster cast seals for all the six flags, for all those six countries, and right there is the symbology of the Confederacy. And one of the things that people have no idea about and actually is represented by the fact there are two statues left on the south mall. Those two statues are the assemblage which is the Littlefield fountain and the other one is George Washington. So why is the George Washington statue still there? Well it’s not associated with the Confederacy, but if you go up to the second floor of the Tower and you go into the Life Sciences library and look at that symbol of the Confederate nation, who’s right there in the middle? It’s George Washington on horseback. So in some sense the Daughters of the Revolution who are paying for putting George Washington’s statue on the mall in actually 1930, it didn’t get up until 1955 or 1950-sometime. He’s put there as the father of two countries, he’s the father of the United States, but he’s also the father of the Confederacy and that comes out through this Confederate symbology of which the Confederate flags were part, from the 1930s up until when they were taken down, I guess a year and a half ago.

Names of buildings are especially significant on campus, and you talk about a lot of different names, and naming, and changing of names, so let’s talk about some of those. First of all, the main library on campus, which everyone knows as the PCL, what does that stand for?

Ervin Perry and Carlos Castañeda

That’s Perry-Castañeda. That library was open in the late 70s, in fact must have been 78 because they had their anniversary last year and I think both the Perry and the Castañeda families were present for that. That was quite an event. But yes that library was opened in the late 70s and named after Ervin Perry, who was the first African American who was hired in a tenure track position here at the University of Texas, in the School of Engineering. He actually went on to get tenure and then passed as an Associate Professor. And Carlos Castañeda had been an undergraduate, a Mexican American undergraduate here, and then I think he got his Masters, I believe he got his PhD here as well, came back as a lecturer and he taught for a while, and I believe he was associated with the Benson Library for many years. So that [main] library was appropriately named after a couple of the pioneers in terms of the integration of the University of Texas.

And then in the other direction, if we move down to the hill to the Darrell K. Royal stadium, Darrell K. Royal is a hero to many people in Texas. Who was he, why was he celebrated, and what’s left out of the story?

Aerial view of DKR Memorial Stadium on the Texas campus as seen on Sunday April 23, 2017.
RALPH BARRERA/AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Darrell K. Royal was a very successful football coach, in fact, probably more people know about him and his success than they know about anything else. If you can’t name anybody else associated with the University of Texas, you can usually name either Earl Campbell or Darrell K. Royal. He won three national football championships as coach here, but what people don’t usually know is that his second, the one in 1969, has the distinction of being the last all white national championship football team. Darrell in later years claimed that he didn’t recruit any black folks for the team because alumni wouldn’t like it, which is probably true, but nevertheless, he didn’t, and there’s a movie about when the University of Texas at Austin was to play Syracuse in the Cotton Bowl and the University of Texas football team refused to play or allow Ernie Davis, who was one of the early black stars for Syracuse, to play in the game. There’s a whole movie about that. So racial segregation in Texas football or Texas athletics in general was pretty extreme, although to University of Texas’ credit, we were one of the first schools in the Southwest Conference to integrate. We had our first black track athletes were recruited in 1964, and finally in 1970, actually Julius Whittier, who just passed last year, was the first black football player at the University of Texas to play on a national championship football team, when the University won. But even the basketball team, Royal went on to be the A.D. for a number of years, the athletic director, and his [basketball] coach who eventually integrated the team, I have a quote of him saying that they didn’t have any black basketball players on the team because there were no black boys in the state of Texas who were good enough or tall enough to play.

So in 1954 the Supreme Court decides the famous case of Brown vs. Board of Education and that prohibited racial segregation in public schools. U.T. responded in various ways, but one of the ways is architectural, and your tour takes us to sites of several dorms that were new in the 50s maybe we could talk about that for a bit.

One of the things that happens is first of all, there’s Swett vs. Board of Education which is finally won, the supreme court decision that’s won by Heman Swett along with Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP in the 1950s. So immediately after that we get our first black students at the University of Texas, but they’re all graduate students. And none of the graduate students were allowed to stay on campus until around 1954 or 55 where there was space made in one dorm, which is down by where the San Jacinto garages are for some of those folks. Almost immediately subsequent to that, University of Texas, and this is now after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954; in 1956 the University of Texas decides to allow the first black undergraduates to come to campus. At that point they had to decide what to do about housing for those students. The decision was made not to offer housing at all to black women, so most black women who came to the University of Texas in 56 lived in a cooperative down on 10^th St. on what used to be East Avenue — I-35 has now been placed over 10^th St. — in effect the dorm where they lived was destroyed in order to be able to put I-35 through. But anyway it was a co-op, and it was co-op which they shared with women from Huston Tillotson. There were a few black women who were allowed to stay in a co-op, which was across the street from where Carothers is now, where the Belo Communications building is — Whitis House was a co-op in which a small number of black women were allowed to stay, but that was off campus, the University didn’t own it at that point.

The University decided to allow some black men to stay on campus, and those folks were placed in basically two dorms that were dorms that had been purchased after World War II as temporary housing for students on campus. They were army barracks that were dismantled and brought to campus and built back up again. So one was placed more or less where the Alumni Center is now, and the other is placed over where the San Jacinto parking garage is. Ironically, in that period of time the Law School had decided to build a new, very luxurious dormitory for graduate students and law students. It was the first dormitory that was air conditioned on campus. It was opened in 1954 shortly after the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision and the dean of the law school decided to name it after William Simkins, who was a law professor for 30 years, very well known, but he also was grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. He and his brother, who was actually a UT regent, had started the Klan in Florida. So right after, within weeks to months after the Supreme Court decision, the head of the law school decides to name a dorm after a grand dragon the Ku Klux Klan, and right behind it is the wooden, tar paper shack, army surplus dorm that they designated for black students, two years later in 1956, so the juxtaposition was hard to miss, pretty complete.

Let’s finish up with something else that surprised me, the story of the Eyes of Texas, the song that students sing without probably knowing the history of it, so you take the tour to the Texas Cowboys Pavilion, which is also right down there by the dorms you were just talking about. Can you tell us about that site and about the activities there?

We cover this in two places. One is in front of the Robert E Lee statue. Robert E Lee, very few people know this, and it does seem strange, but Robert E. Lee became a University President right after the end of the Civil War, so he loses the Civil War and within a couple of years he is the President of Washington University in Virginia, which later became Washington and Lee. He’s the President and there is a young man by the name of Prather who is a law student under him, who subsequently became a President of the University of Texas. Now one of the things that Prather brought to the University of Texas when he came was a saying. Robert E. Lee at the end of every speech he made to his collective students and faculty members would say “The eyes of the south are upon you,” and so when Prather got to the University of Texas he decided to take freely from what Lee had been saying, and at the end of his speeches to his assembled students and faculty members he would say “The eyes of Texas are upon you,” taking it directly from Lee. Students of course found that to be interesting, and they decided to create a satirical song about it that put words to it, “the Eyes of Texas are upon you,” and the words are probably very familiar to many of you who are listening to this, and they put it to a familiar tune, which was “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” which actually comes from “I’ve Been Working on the Levee,” which is either a work song sung by black folks or a minstrel song that was developed making fun of black folks, but either one, they took that tune. And then its first performances were in minstrel shows, blackface minstrel shows, the Hancock Opera House down on Sixth Street was actually the first time it was performed, and it was performed in blackface. So it comes from the minstrel tradition, it’s a satiric tune, it plays off Robert E. Lee, and was originally sung in blackface.

And how is this connected with the Texas Cowboys?

Well the Texas Cowboys are an interesting group. It’s one of the primary “spirit groups” and has been around for many years. They certainly sing the song and all that but one of the things the Texas Cowboys were most known for was they would put on minstrel shows as part of, sometimes twice a year, but almost always at least once a year, during either the fall Homecoming or during the spring Roundup celebrations. And so they would put on minstrel shows, there were comedy shows and musical shows. As many as 60 of these young people would dress in blackface and cavort around. The racism was so extreme that they also played Mexican Americans in blackface. So you have stereotyping and denigration of Mexican Americans in sombreros and serapes and things like that in blackface, as well what they considered to be black people dressed in stripes and other kinds of disparaging kinds of ways, and that went on until 1964.

Til 1964?

1964-1965 it was outlawed, there was one final young cowboy who raced across the stage in black face, but there’s been kind of racially tinged play, you could call it, associated with the Roundup for years and years, well through the 1990s.

Prof. Gordon

Well thank you for making this history known to all of us in the community, and I think to a lot of people outside the community will be really interested in it. The website will definitely make it accessible for people on campus and off campus too, so thank you and thanks for talking to us today.

Well thank you for bringing me in, and thank you for asking me insightful questions, and giving me a chance to talk about what’s going here on campus, or what went on on campus.

You can listen to this interview on 15 Minute History.

You can see the online Racial Geography Tour at racialgeographytour.org

That website will include further reading on all the topics we discuss.

It’s in Their Blood

By Ted Banks

(This article is reposted from Fourth Part of the World.)

The Progressive-Era white press and their audience had a fascination with Indians judging from the amount of ink that was devoted to musings on their place and progress in society. One component of that fascination, indeed one that was the basis for much speculation on how successfully or not Indians were integrating into white America, was how much “Indianness” could be attributed to Indian blood.

Many observers have noted that notions of blood and “mixing” among whites varied depending on whose blood was being considered. While the “one-drop” rule dictated that a single drop of black blood could overwhelm generations of otherwise Anglo (or Indian) infusion, Indian blood offered no such absolute outcome. At times commenters noted the tenacity of Indian blood, as demonstrated by its ability to preserve Indian physical characteristics across generations. Other times, white observers painted Indian blood as conversely unstable, susceptible to dilution through intermarriage, and seemingly at times, social contact or cultural proximity.

In a 1907 article penned by Frederic J. Haskins titled “Indians Increasing in America,” the author cites several examples of the persistence of “Indian” traits, which he ties to a rough accounting of blood quantum. He notes that the “strength of Indian racial traits is shown by the fact that the 700 persons now in Virginia who can prove their descent from Pocahontas and her English husband, John Rolfe, still have the Indian hair and high cheek bones.” Commenting on a handful of Indian politicians, Haskins introduces “Adam Monroe Byrd, a Representative from Mississippi, [who] is also of Indian blood.” Haskins reports that Byrd “traces his ancestry through a long line of distinguished Cherokee chieftains,” and that “He has the high cheek bones, copper skin and straight hair which indicate the blood of the original American.” Haskins’s article reveals the casual ambivalence with which settlers framed the racial makeup of Indians, and their desire to monitor the relative progress of Indians in America accordingly.

Four years before Haskins’s piece, an article on the upcoming Indian exhibition at the St. Louis World’s Fair played the other side of the ambivalence spectrum while employing much the same rhetoric regarding Indian racial traits. Titled “Pageant of a Dying Race,” the feature dramatically promised the “last live chapter of the red man in American history is to be read by millions of pale faces at the Universal Exposition.” Like Haskins, the author of “Pageant of a Dying Race,” T. R. MacMechen, describes the persistence of Indian racial traits, observing that “(the) blood of Pontiac, of Black Hawk, of Tecumseh and his wily brother, The Prophet, flows in the veins of the descendants who will be at the exposition,” and that “(no) student of American history will view the five physical types of the Ogalalla Sioux without memories of Red Cloud, nor regard the (word unclear) without recalling the crafty face of that Richelieu of Medicine Men, Sitting Bull.” However, MacMechen argues that despite the seeming durability of Indian traits, “the savage is being fast fused by marriage and custom into a dominant race, so that this meeting of warriors becomes the greatest and probably the last opportunity for the world to behold the primitive Indian.” In MacMechen’s account, marriage and custom function as ways to counterbalance, or perhaps mask, the otherwise durable Indian blood.

Festival Hall at World Fair (via Wikipedia)

White supremacy dictated the ways in which whites interacted with racial “others,” but not in such a way that all of these interactions were uniform across groups. That is to say that while intermarriage between blacks and whites was prohibited throughout much of the country on either a de facto or de jure basis, intermarriage between settlers and Indians was, at least at times, encouraged. A 1906 Dallas Morning News piece reported that “Quanah Parker is advocating the intermarriage of whites with the Indians for a better citizenship among the Indians.” The piece noted that “Quanah’s mother was a white woman and several of his daughters have married into white families.” The item quoted Parker as saying “Mix the blood, put white man’s blood in Indians, then in a few years you will have a better class of Indians,” and noted that “(Parker) hopes to live to see the time that his tribe will be on the level with those of pure anglo-saxon blood.” Another DMN article from two years later seems to reveal a gendered wrinkle to such unions, reporting that “(with) the coming of Yuletide Chief Quanah Parker of the Comanche Indians realized one of the greatest ambitions of his life when his young son, Quanah Jr., a Carlisle graduate, was married to Miss Laura Clark, a graduate of the Lawton High School last year,” and that “(this) is the first time in the history of Indians of this section where an Indian has been married to a girl of white blood.”

If persistent racial traits were attributed to Indian blood, but Indians were being “fast fused by marriage and custom” into white society, the result might be some Indians in unexpected places, or at least circumstances. Haskins, in his piece, noted that at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, “. . . the strong voice at the entrance of the Indian Building calling through a megaphone, . . . (the) barker who thus hailed the passing throng in the merry, jocular fashion of the professional showman was a full-blooded Indian boy, a product of the new dispensation of things, just as Geronimo was of the old.” Of Charles Curtis, a US Senator from Kansas, Haskins observed that “(he) is not of pure Indian heritage, but his mother belonged to the Kaw tribe. . . . He has the hair and color of an Indian, but in politics does not play an Indian game.” A Dallas Morning News correspondent reported in 1906 that Quanah Parker had been elected a delegate to the Republican convention, but that he had declined, stating that he had no interest in politics. The anonymous scribe went on to comment that

Quanah is a half-breed, his mother having been Cynthiana (sic) Parker. Having
white blood in his veins, his conduct is absolutely incomprehensible. For who
ever heard before of a white man, or any kind of a man with white blood in his
veins, who did not want the honors or the salary of office? Still we must remember
that Quanah is King of the Comanches, and that is a pretty good position itself.

The writer’s tone indicates he was speaking somewhat in jest, but the gist of his comment was that Quanah, although possessing “half” white blood by his estimation, was “playing the Indian game” by staying out of politics, and, in doing so, positioned himself a world away from “any kind” of white man.

(via Wikimedia)

This is all to say that if one wanted to track the uses of “blood” in white America’s Progressive-Era discourse on Indians, the results would be—excuse the pun—mixed, to say the least. Like their feelings on Indians in general, the habitual deployment of blood as an explanatory concept nonetheless exhibited a remarkable ambivalence; white Americans seemed to think both that “Indian blood” definitely was of immense importance and that it could mean about anything they needed it to. This ambivalence stands out even more starkly when compared to the aforementioned belief in the complete impenetrability of African blood of the same period. A cynical reading might well deduce that white Americans said anything and everything about blood that would help to fortify white supremacy. A devil’s advocate counterpoint might argue that the rise of the eugenics movement indicated that white Americans of the time indeed believed in at least some of what they said. And still another would remind us that both of those could be, and probably were, the case.

Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies, by Sue Peabody (2017)

The Isle Bourbon and the Isle de France lie in the southern Indian Ocean, 1,200 miles off the southeast coast of Africa. France acquired the islands in 1638 and 1715, respectively, and developed Isle Bourbon as a provisioning stop for grain and livestock for ships traveling between Europe and India. Although these islands shared certain features with France’s Caribbean colonies, they also differed from them in the practices of racial ideologies and the economic and slavery regimes. For example, the sugar monoculture revolution did not arrive to Bourbon and Isle de France until the early nineteenth century, after the collapse of the sugar economy in St. Domingue. In this very specific context, the narrative frame of Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies hinges on a betrayal.

Madeleine’s Children tells the story of Madeleine, an enslaved woman of Indian (southeast Asian) origin who was manumitted in 1789 by her wealthy French owner, Marie Anne Routier, yet was not informed of her manumission until Routier’s death nineteen years later. Routier also left Madeleine a financial bequest large enough to pay for the freedom of her enslaved twenty-two year-old son, Furcy. However, soon after (1809), Routier’s son-in-law, Joseph Lory, tricked Madeleine out of this bequest and acquired the ownership of Furcy. Furcy sued both for his freedom and for money owed to him several times without success until achieving de facto freedom in 1829 and official free status in 1848. Peabody’s inquiries revolve around the ways that that betrayal, and the consequences for the betrayed, interacted with geography, colonial politics, the legal and bureaucratic system, and economic and family entanglements. She underscores the complicated family relationships by exposing the likelihood that the frequently abusive Eugénie Lory, Marie Anne’s daughter and Joseph’s wife, was Furcy’s half-sister through the patriarch of the family, Charles Routier. In the context of growing animosity between the creole elites and the French colonial authorities, aggravated by the Indian Ocean turn toward sugar production and consequent need for slaves, Furcy’s claim to freedom and reimbursement ignited a political crisis in Bourbon.

Through her study of ship passenger lists, censuses, bills of sale, and other autobiographies, Peabody sets herself the ambitious goal of understanding both the practices of enslavement by French Indian Ocean creole elites and the experiences of slavery and freedom from the perspective of the enslaved. This is particularly challenging given the paucity of narratives by freed-people from the world of French slavery (compared to British and American abolitionist literature). However she assembles enough information about Madeleine, Furcy, and the Routiers-Lorys to emphasize the centrality of family in either unmaking or making the enslaved or freeperson’s sense of self and place. Both Madeleine and Furcy were torn from family by their owners, and their first actions upon achieving freedom were to re-embed themselves firmly in family and economic society—Madeleine, by acting (unsuccessfully) to secure her son’s freedom, and Furcy, by setting up a confectionary business, marrying, and raising children. Likewise, the meaning of travel could shift dramatically, depending on one’s position. For the enslaved, travel usually caused catastrophic dislocation and rupture, while for the colonial elites, it reinforced their place in family and commercial global networks.

Readers familiar with Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard’s Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation, will appreciate the significance that Peabody attaches to legal and bureaucratic documents, not only for later historians but for people fighting to obtain or maintain their freedom. In the case of Furcy, who may have been the best-documented slave in Bourbon, Peabody had to rely on archives that were incomplete. Some particularly important documents, she surmises, may have been missing by design. She argues that slavery was a system that was maintained not only through the state’s coercive laws, but by corruption and manipulation of those laws and falsification or elimination of documents on the part of the owners. This manipulation had ramifications both contemporaneously and in future years: critical documents would turn up absent, obstructing later legal recourse for Furcy. Therefore Furcy was a victim not only of the institution of slavery but of Lory’s personal corruption and unscrupulousness—traits, Peabody argues, that typified the French Indian Ocean creole elite class. The historian’s efforts to make sense of the corrupted archive, or “the chasm between the written documents and the lived experience of slavery and freedom,” is one of the pervasive themes of Madeleine’s Children.

In the conversation with other historians, Peabody seeks to deepen understandings of freedom and slavery by enlarging the focus to include the French empire as it reached beyond the Atlantic. Her attention to the slave smuggling triggered by the abolition of transoceanic slave trading reinforces studies of contraband in the late eighteenth century. And while Madeleine, Marie Anne and Eugénie all inhabited a reality far from the revolutionary feminists in mainland France, Peabody is deeply invested in understanding the experiences of women, including highlighting the entangling practices of employing enslaved women as midwives and wet-nurses. Focusing on one family’s experiences reveals the complex and messy underbelly of an empire in the process of transformation and France’s bumpy trajectory toward the promises of the 1789 revolution.

City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas by Andrew M. Busch (2017)

Austin is a global city, home to some of the most technologically advanced and successful corporations in the world as well as a renowned university system that provides highly trained and educated employees to those same top companies. All the while, Austin’s constant obsession with building a sustainable and environmentally friendly city contributes to the growth of a largely white upper-middle class demographic who can afford living in proximity to Austin’s finest and natural recreational spaces. A look at Austin’s past reveals a pattern of racial discrimination as the city constantly places the needs of white residents, boosters, developers, and investors above those of Black and Latino residents.

Andrew M. Busch’s new book, City in a Garden traces one hundred years of Austin’s urban, environmental, political, and social history. Busch explains that Austin’s investment in big business and innovative environmental development projects was and still is an investment in the social construction of whiteness that has paid off beautifully for upper-middle class white people. Busch argues that no matter how sustainable Austin is, or remains, there is a troubling “shadow” constantly growing behind the “garden” that combines the urban and the natural. The shadow is a century of racial discrimination in the form of federal, state, and local urban development policies that built an environmentally sustainable and desirable playground for white upper-middle class people. Simultaneously these policies and city planning projects kept Black and Latinx people out of any real decision making processes, leaving them with the least desirable spaces in the city, spaces that remain underfunded and subject their residents to constant threat of removal and displacement.

Busch’s main purpose is to expose the complexities that arise when space is racialized through the process of urbanization. He foregrounds Austin as an exceptional case that further complicates the relationships between city leaders and developers, environmentalists, and the Black and Latinx communities as they all make claims for their ideas of how Austin’s space should be utilized. Furthermore, Busch suggests that the “history of human-environment interaction in Austin has revolved around managing water as well as enhancing access to and preserving unique environmental characteristics that have high use and exchange value” (14). This is apparent from the beginning of Austin’s city planning history.

From the late 1890s to the 1930s, city leaders focused on subduing the water system in and around Austin and successfully dammed the Colorado River. The project signified the capability of harnessing nature to provide residents, farmers, and especially companies with cheap power and flood control. In the 1930s, as the population grew, and new land became available to build on and to accommodate new types of labor, suburbanization and the Federal Housing Association (FHA) continued to place white communities’ needs above all others. While the FHA demarcated Black and Latinx spaces as “dilapidated” and ripe for redevelopment, the Home Owners Loan Corporation made sure that white neighborhoods remained white through restrictive covenants and other illegal methods that kept most people of color in south and east Austin. By the 1950s, rampant deindustrialization in Austin made working-class industrial jobs harder to get in the city. The process of ridding Austin’s inner city of heavy industry incentivized middle and upper-class labor and the companies that would employ them with new recreational spaces, the convenience of suburban life, and tax breaks for oil and high-tech companies. For Black and Latinx communities, the removal and redevelopment projects that resulted from mid-century urban renewal only served to exacerbate racial segregation as new housing was built on the east side of Austin.

Downtown from Austin's Famous Zilker Park — *Downtown from Austin’s Famous Zilker Park. Source: Wikimedia.*

As the book enters the 1960s, Busch strengthens his argument. Austin’s environmentalists started to challenge urban and environmental projects that posed a threat to the natural environment and recreational spaces. The best example here is their fight to ban motorized vehicles from the west side of Town Lake while the east side had to contend with massive motorboat races that drew thousands of people throughout the year and posed a threat to Latinx communities. Destroying the east Town Lake community’s park to build a stadium for the races sparked the organization of people in the community as well as organizations active in the Chicano and Civil Rights Movements. After six years of protest, the city finally moved the boat races without the aid of white environmentalists who never considered the negative effects that their efforts had on Latinx communities. Overall, the 60s and 70s proved that liberalism fell short for marginalized communities and white environmentalists only considered natural spaces as an environment in need of protection from city development projects.

In the 1980s, Austin leaders began to aggressively diversify the local economy as defense, oil, and high-tech industries effectively sparked the process of globalization. The University of Texas was integral in this economic transformation and supplied these new industries with skilled labor and state-of-the-art research capabilities funded mostly by federal defense contracts. This massive shift caused the city’s white population to expand residential areas in the north and the west. While these residential areas began to threaten physical spaces that environmentalists considered pristine and worthy of protecting, Black and Latinx residents living to the east and south saw production facilities move in to their neighborhoods making life more hazardous.

In examining the 1990s, Busch focuses on the bifurcation of the environmental movement in the fight against aggressive private and federally funded urban expansion. Traditional white environmentalists took on the encroachment of private development in pristine and untouched natural space. For this group, unchecked development threatened the Edwards Aquifer, an essential source of water and important part of Austin’s ecosystem. East Austin environmentalists agreed that the aquifer needed protection but added that their communities needed just as much protection from both old and new environmental hazards facing Black and Latinx people. For eastsiders, environmental injustice was a civil rights issue. They constructed “the environment as a hybrid landscape, one where natural and built reinforced one another and combined to undermine minorities health and access to jobs, education, and recreation…” (226). But, as Busch argues in the epilogue, eastside environmentalists lost to their white counterparts as the 2000s saw an increased development in east Austin because building east would not disturb any protected environments, eased the increasingly expensive housing crisis, and proved to be extremely profitable. Using the epilogue as a kind of policy proposal, Busch argues for a more equitable city planning and economic structure by way of creating jobs that do not just serve a certain sector of Austin’s growing population. He asserts that historical exclusion should be met with contemporary inclusion in every aspect and that gentrification poses an immediate threat to impoverished communities who are already being pressured to leave because of a lack of economic opportunity. Busch suggests that rent control, direct subsidies, and other mechanisms should be employed to create “a holistically livable environment” for all Austinites.

Busch’s book is important for students in a variety of disciplines, residents interested in city development and planning, city planners, housing and economic justice activists, as well as environmental activists. City in a Garden also leaves the history of Austin ripe for further research. In what ways did Black and Latinx residents challenge, participate, and/or survive the growing spatial disparities of their white counterparts? A research project on the historically Black Wheatsville community could provide some answers. What was life like in pre-WWII Austin for residents living in areas affected by environmental changes and hazards? An inquiry in to Mexican agricultural workers living in colonias around Austin might shed light on how changes in Austin’s economy – transitions from agricultural, to industrial, and in to oil and technology – affected where Latinos’ in Austin lived and worked over time. Readers interested in education might also be intrigued by the brief mentions of educational segregation and its lasting problems in Austin. With a hundred-year historical sweep the questions this book fosters seem endless, which is an excellent problem to have.

Overall, City in a Garden reveals a complicated past littered with good and bad decisions in hopes that people in the present and future might reckon with and correct the inequality literally built in to Austin’s city limits.

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